The Dolphins Make Me Cry.com - Forums

Dave Hyde wrote a great article calling out the GM and Coach for the problems inside the team. I had forgotten this was an issue under Adam Gase as well.



MIAMI GARDENS — The Miami Dolphins have been NFL outliers the past few years, and proud of it, nonconformists who leant into their progressive ways. Coaches called players, “teammates.” Players got paid who didn’t need new contracts. They worked less rather than more in a culture of equanimity and kumbaya togetherness.

The result was this dud of an 8-9 season. But still Tuesday, in an annual post-mortem talk to media, general manager Chris Grier referred this team that became troubled by unprofessional edges all the way to captain Tyreek Hill quitting on them in the finale, as a, “player-driven team.”

Does that explain the problem? And show what has to change?

It’s not just this team that should get called, “soft,” as various Dolphins who lived in the locker room have labeled it over the past year. It’s those running the team, first and foremost.
It’s not just players who need to be called out for being late to meetings in a symptom of larger problems inside a team.

It’s Grier and coach Mike McDaniel who should be called out first for allowing such nonsense to happen.

Grier is a double offender at this, too. He was general manager when player tardiness in the Adam Gase years became such a problem the offending players’ names were written on the locker-room whiteboard next to the fined dollar amount to embarrass them. We, the media, wrote down the names.

That didn’t correct the problem. Nor did this current Dolphins new-age culture prevent it from happening again. It became such an issue McDaniel addressed it in his postseason meeting, saying players would have to be on time next season.
But how did he let it happen this season?

“One thing I did learn during the course of the season is that fining guys … didn’t particularly move the needle in the way we need to so I’ll adjust as I should as the head coach,’’ McDaniel said.

He could have asked Gase. Or Grier. It’s nice to say you are a “player-driven team,” because that’s the goal. Florida Panthers coach Paul Maurice says he sometimes stands behind the bench at games and doesn’t have to talk to players because they’re saying all the right things themselves. They’re two-time Stanley Cup finalists with a title, too.

These Dolphins have won nothing. Why should the players be given keys of the franchise? People talk of “culture” in sports, but often have no idea what it means. This is it. Something as little as the coach letting players be late for meetings is a porthole into a team’s professionalism and attention to detail that shows up (or not) in games.

The quest for excellence, you see, is found in things big and small. I once asked NBA veteran Shane Battier what “Heat Culture” meant to him.

“If practice starts at noon, everyone’s standing on the line with knee braces on and shoes laced, ready to go, at 11:59,” he said.

Doesn’t that happen everywhere — these are pros, after all?

He laughed. “Usually, at the start of most teams’ practices, guys are shooting half-court shots, running around, not really ready. Here, there’s a culture of discipline.”

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2025/01/07/dave-hyde-miami-dolphins-were-soft-at-the-top-with-grier-mcdaniel-and-it-showed-on-the-field/

I agree with this article.  Being a nice guy with the players may make players happy, but it doesn't win playoff games, let alone Super Bowls.  If you want to see .500 win seasons every year then just keep things the way they are. If you want more, then get players that will not complain about working hard, and start coaching with some authority.

The problem is the GM.  Gase and Flores weren't horrible coaches, but the GM scapegoated them when he was the one who is incompetent. 

Dolphin's have a pretty decent HC that is worth hanging onto.  But it is hard to replace GMs and not coaches because GMs always want to bring in their guy. 

It's my opinion that McDaniel needs assistance with the disciplinary side of things. Make it a sort of good cop, bad cop thing. The good cop is there to pat you on the back and say everything is going to be alright and then the bad cop comes in and roughs you up a bit while the good cop is out of the room. I don't know who plays the bad cop, but someone who's willing to play that part and McDaniel only needs to make sure that players understand that if there's an issue with that dynamic, it will be the player moving on and not the bad cop. I'm fine with McDaniel being the good cop, but he needs to find someone willing to be the bad cop. I think there are guys out there that would be ok with that. I don't think Grier is a bad cop sort of guy though and I really don't think that's a role for the GM anyway. An assistant coach or someone has to be that guy.

He had that in Welker but it didn't appear to work. If he landed Darren Rizzi and made him Assistant Head coach again it just might.

Only works if the McDaniels doesn't undercut the disciplinarian. 

Nah, Welker didn't have any voice in the locker room. If he did we wouldn't be letting him go.

Have the players who missed/were late to meeting been named?

I know it's been implied that Tyreek was possibly one of them (which is a massive black mark considering he's a captain) but no one has been really stuck with the tag. 

I've said this since McDaniel was hired:

The only way you're going to overcome him in having a winning culture in pro football is by having leaders among the players who essentially take the team over and create such a culture themselves.

The problem there however is that the players most likely to rise to the status of leaders on any NFL team are the ones with personalities similar to the head coach's.  On this team that means you have goofballs as your player leaders, and obviously that won't create the necessary culture.

The pivotal move here was hiring a head coach whose personality isn't much different from Pee Wee Herman's.  That won't work in pro football.

The team takes on the personality of its coach, and it does that by determining the kinds of players most likely to become leaders.  On Dan Campbell's team those will be the tough, driven, and determined guys.  On this team it'll be the goofballs.

McD might fall in the category of great coordinator but lacking as head coach.

Grier shouldn't be a GM

I agree the good cop/bad cop strategy (I just saw an online clip with Bill Cowher saying he did this with Roethlisberger when he was a rookie), BUT it's the head coach that has to be the bad cop.  If the head coach is the good cop then the players would mostly just ignore the assistant that is being the bad cop.

Forget the good cop bad cop stuff... let's just start with basic accountability.

These guys are being paid a lot of money to do their job. Yes, it's more fun than a regular job most of us have, but it is a job. It's a responsibility.

Dare I say, if most of the rest of us didn't show up on time, more-so multiple times, there would be some kind of consequences. The problem is in this case, there were none that seemed to matter.

This is where the coaches have failed. You don't necessarily have to get in someone's face about it. You don't make threats. You make it known that it's unacceptable, and if it continues there will be payback. If fines don't work, then benching. Or suspensions. Or delistings. Jimmy Johnson was far from seen as being a mean coach, but players were terrified of getting cut if they royally screwed up.

JJ was definitely mean at times, but you're right about players being terrified of getting cut.   If you were out of shape or even suffering from nagging injuries, you were on his shit list.   I remember during the June mini camp his first year here, some of the rookies weren't used to heavy running in the oppressive South Florida heat/humidity and were cramping.   He walked up to them and said, "I feel bad for you rookies.  You're cramped up after you just got here and there's vets here in shape and ready to roll."    Then, the eyes turned red and the horns came out and he goes, "Listen motherfuckers!!   This is a job, not college!!   If your ass has cramps at training camp, I'll cut you in a nanosecond!!"

It's incredibly weird to see people pining for a tough-guy head coach like Brian Flores doesn't exist.

There's a lot of room on the continuum between essentially Pee Wee Herman reincarnate and Brian Flores.  Just because you don't want Pee Wee Herman 2.0 doesn't mean you want Brian Flores.  There are other options besides those two.

Pee Wee Herman as McDaniel? No, no, no... McDaniel is much more on the Ferris Bueller side of the nerd spectrum...

If "Pee Wee Herman" can get the Dolphins to the playoffs in back-to-back seasons while all the tough guys who preceded him (like Brian Flores and Nick Saban) can't, perhaps the fans are fixating on the wrong factors.

In fact, looking at the last four Dolphins coaches to make the playoffs (McDaniel, Gase, Sparano, and Wannstedt), none of them seem to be the kind of authoritarian that is being lusted for.

It's almost like it's not about the results.
Like they want a coach who is tough on these spoiled players for it's own sake.

There is a world of difference between he and the middle of the road coches like McDermitt and the Harbaugh brothers that comparing him to Flores or Saban makes no sense. McDaniel is so left of tough it really does have a negative effect on the team. You can't allow players to continually break rules regardless of who they are. It will negatively affect everyone else.

Who is a losing coach with the correct amount of toughness?

I mean, Andy Reid is pretty widely considered the top coach in the league right now, and he's famously not an authoritarian.  So it seems to me that the issue - as always - is not how tough you are, but how many wins you are stacking.

So the actual problem is the record, not the toughness.

Exactly.  It's not that he's not an authoritarian -- it's that he's simply not effective.

If you used a scale from 0 to 100 to measure someone's authoritarianism, with a score of let's say 50 being optimal for an NFL head coach, the fact that Brian Flores has a score of 90 and is way over the top with regard to what's optimal is nonetheless immaterial with regard to the fact that McDaniel has a score of just 5.  McDaniel is still inadequate, regardless of what Brian Flores or the other over the top authoritarians of the world are doing.

Again, making the playoffs is nothing special.  Nearly 44% of NFL teams do that every year.  It's about a coin flip in terms of probability.

And again as well, "lusting for an authoritarian" is a strawman.  Just because you don't want McDaniel/Pee Wee Herman doesn't automatically mean you want an authoritarian.

Hypothetically McDaniel could be part of only 5% of the population who are totally unfit to be an NFL head coach.  That would leave 95% of the population to choose from.  Surely you could find a non-authoritarian who is also a non-McDaniel within that 95%.

Then why is McDaniel the only Miami head coach to make the playoffs in back-to-back years since the Clinton Administration?
If it's so easy, why couldn't the earlier tough guy coaches make the playoffs at all?

Again: perhaps the fans prioritize the wrong things.

The problem there is that making the playoffs for two consecutive years has been accomplished by many NFL head coaches who never won Super Bowls and weren't considered among the best in the game, and so that achievement isn't distinctive in the NFL beyond the recent Dolphins.  The uniqueness of McDaniel's accomplishment of two consecutive playoff berths with the Dolphins is therefore more an indictment of the Dolphins' other recent coaches than it is a favorable indication about McDaniel within the context of the NFL as a whole.

Again, just because McDaniel isn't effective doesn't mean anybody wants any of the other recent Dolphins' head coaches instead.  Those coaches are non-sequiturs with regard to McDaniel's (in)adequacy.  The whole kit and caboodle of them can be inadequate, including McDaniel.

What? Jimmy was the ULTIMATE disciplinarian. No, he wasn't mean but he was NOT your friend, he was your coach. That's completely different from the way McDaniel interacts with his players.

And again this is what I said when he was hired:  there has never been a highly successful head coach in college or NFL football who has McDaniel's personality.  And in fact the vast majority of the highly successful head coaches at those levels have had personalities quite different from his.

If you strain to come up with just one who is similar you might land on Dick Vermeil for example, who is a notoriously highly emotional softy, but he was far from the "Pee Wee Herman" type character McDaniel is, as has been just about every other head coach in NFL history, including ALL of the highly successful ones.

If a team didn't take on the personality of its coach as they say, all of this wouldn't matter nearly as much.  But it does.

Is Andy Reid a disciplinarian?  I don't know, but I saw Travis Kelce yelling in his fucking face in a way that I don't imagine a lot of other coaches allowing, from your list of hard-asses.

People have to get away from this notion that if you believe McDaniel doesn't have what it takes because he has nowhere near enough of the toughness/authoritativeness to run an NFL team and have his team embody his personality on the field, that it automatically means you believe "a disciplinarian" is necessary.

If a guy who is five feet tall can't possibly succeed in the NBA, it doesn't mean someone has to be seven feet tall to do so.  Michael Jordan was 6 foot 6.

You're just saying the words "Pee Wee Herman" like it's some sort of clinical diagnosis.  You even cite famously soft Dick Vermeil while saying "but he's not Pee Wee Herman" with no further explanation.  Andy Reid is also not a disciplinarian, but that's different too, somehow.

The tell here is that McDaniel is the same coach now that he has been for three years.  And you didn't have any of this "Pee Wee Herman" commentary (or this making the playoffs is super easy, barely an inconvenience commentary) when he took Miami to the playoffs for the first time in 6 years.  Nor did you have it when Miami was getting ready to play BAL with the #1 seed on the line in week 17 of 2023.  It is a take you developed when Miami started losing in 2024.

So why bother with all this amateur psychologist nonsense?  Just say "McDaniel needs to go because he's losing" and leave it at that.

It's most definitely not a take I developed when the Dolphins were losing in 2024.  This thread contains my thoughts about this topic just after McDaniel was hired:

http://www.thedolphinsmakemecry.com/forums/index.php?topic=27201.0

The "Pee Wee Herman" take is most definitely something you developed while the Dolphins were losing.

I would post your attempts to defend your take on coaching demeanor during times when the Dolphins were winning, but your MO is to only show up when the Dolphins are losing; a look back at your posting history during any Dolphins winning streak shows you are simply not present.  So you get to skip that whole accountability part of having a take.

Call it "silly and goofy" as I did originally in February of 2022, right after McDaniel was hired (as noted at the link above), or call it Pee Wee Herman.  What's the difference?  Pee Wee Herman is merely a shorthand that's more understandable for people.


When I post and don't post is irrelevant to whether McDaniel has accomplished anything distinctive as an NFL head coach -- he hasn't.  It seems you (erroneously) believe he has, however, and so apparently that's the difficulty you're having in following along with the topic.

It is, however, relevant to whether you accept accountability for your takes when they are shown to be wrong... which you don't.

If the only time you appear is when you can try to say "I told you so" with minimal pushback, your words ring hollow.  Because when your takes have been shown to be wrong, you simply disappear until such time that you can avoid having to explain what your error was.  So you certainly have plenty to say today about "Pee Wee Herman" and "soft mentalities," but if MIA wins a playoff game next year, it's not like you'll show up and admit you were wrong... you'll just disappear until the next time the Dolphins start losing again.

There is very little value in the "analysis" of a person who never accepts accountability when they get it wrong.

Again you're illustrating why you can't follow along here.  I haven't been wrong, because McDaniel hasn't done anything distinctive as a head coach.  So there is no need to come in here and say "I was wrong" with regard to my original perspective about McDaniel from February of 2022, because McDaniel has done nothing to date to controvert that.

You're obviously lost in some sort of "McDaniel fantasy," in which he's demonstrated some distinctive level of success in your mind he hasn't in reality.

You cannot vanish when the Dolphins are doing well, wait until they start losing again to reappear, and expect your "I haven't been wrong" claims to be taken seriously.

It's not even that you were wrong; everyone here has been wrong before.
Nor is it that you left for a while and came back; plenty of others have done the same.
It's that you have repeatedly disappeared when the results have made your "analysis" look particularly terrible, and then you miraculously reappear precisely when you think your opinions have become defensible again.

If you only show up to say "I told you so" but disappear when it's your turn to hear it, you should expect your opinions to be dismissed.  Maybe McDaniel is a good coach; maybe he isn't.  But you're in no position to comment with integrity, because any time there are results that prove you wrong, you vanish.

Obviously you have some sort of intransigence with regard to McDaniel, borne of your own personal fantasy about him.  Nobody who thought McDaniel's ability to be a highly successful head coach in the NFL is doubtful has been wrong with regard to that at any point in his tenure with the Dolphins.  He simply hasn't yet distinguished himself as a highly successful head coach, and he may never.

If it's a "message board credibility" war you're after here, have at it -- I'm not interested.  You win.  You're the greatest.  All hail "Spider-Dan."

It's not just about McDaniel; it's also about Tannehill and Tua.

You had a lot of haughty analysis about the shortcomings of all three, and yet when Tannehill was getting MVP votes and taking the Titans to the AFCCG, when Tua was leading the league in passer rating or was named a Pro Bowl starter, or when McDaniel took the team to the playoffs for the first time in 6 years, you weren't around to eat crow.  You simply vanished until there was a better time to offer the same criticisms you had before.

And even with all that, if you were here arguing that McDaniel needs to go because the Dolphins were a losing team this year, then that would be one thing.  I don't agree, but I understand that just as winning is the ultimate deodorant, there's no such thing as a quality loser; when you don't produce wins, you deserve criticism.  It's the armchair therapist psychobabble that I object to: not critiques of his gameplanning, or his talent evaluation, but claims that he is "soft" and "too much like Pee Wee Herman."  This is mysticism... it's fact-free.

Talk about schemes.
Talk about personnel packages.
Talk about football.
Leave this "he's not mentally tough" nonsense by the wayside.  It's garbage.

Wrong again.  I said Tannehill was the beneficiary of relatively rare and transient surrounding factors in Tennessee that allowed him to elevate his performance beyond his norm during that discrete period.  That was borne out and was nothing different from what other otherwise average-level QBs have done in the league for brief periods of time, when their surrounding circumstances were especially favorable.  There was no "crow" to "eat" in that regard.  Tannehill did just what I said he would -- flash upward with elevated performance for a brief period, and then come crashing back down to the average level when his rare and unsustainable surrounding factors inevitably couldn't persist.

Tua I've never taken a strong perspective on either way here.  You must be confusing me with someone else.

But again, you appear to be driven toward sort of "message board credibility" war here.  I've already declared you the winner in that.  Again, all hail "Spider-Dan."  Feel better?

I don't think this article has been brought up before - it covers a lot of the same ground from the Grier/McDaniel end of season press interview, but also makes mention of Tyreek & Ramsey regularly showing up after the stretching portion of practice to join their teammates on the field. It made it clear that it wasn't saying that they were the main culprits that were fined regularly, but it sure suggested that there's some evidence for it.

https://www.si.com/nfl/dolphins/news/diving-into-the-dolphins-fine-mess-01jh3m4m54sg